Call of Duty Elite Manages to Entice Over 1 Million Paying Players

November 22, 2011
Written by Jonathan Leack

Call of Duty Elite may have received harsh criticism since it was announced earlier in the year, but what really matters is whether or not Activision is able to sell the services which is the first of its kind. The current subscriber figures have now been released, and it appears that the complaints weren’t enough to halt Activision’s advancement on consumer wallets.

Activision has announced that Call of Duty Elite has reached more than four million subscribers within a month of Modern Warfare 3‘s launch. In addition, over one million users are currently paying for the service. With a $50 yearly fee, this equates to an estimated revenue of more than 50 million U.S. dollars, which will continue to rise as the game sells additional units throughout the holiday season.

As a comparison, the premium subscription services for Netflix, Hulu Plus, Sirius XM and Xbox Live reached one million paid subscribers after around a year, according to Activision.

This new service has been a way to flow Call of Duty‘s massive fanbase into Activision’s system, allowing the corporate juggernaut to host user information and offer additional services, but at a price. The paid offerings aren’t much different than what we saw given for free and through optional downloadable content in previous releases, which makes it a questionable move. It’s even begun affecting free resources, such as a popular YouTube user’s tip videos which have been subsequently removed after the deployment of Call of Duty Elite. The many users who are complaining appear to be the minority, and now that Activision has experienced success with implementing yearly fees for non-MMORPG products, this might become a more popular trend, similar to how DLC has developed over the course of this generation.